NS News

Netball Scotland signs up to help start a Scottish sporting revolution through award-winning tech app Find a Player

19th June 2018

Netball Scotland have signed-up to award-winning tech app Find a Player to grow participation and improve access to sport for young people in Scotland.

The governing body for netball in Scotland has entered into a ground-breaking agreement with Young Scot, the national youth charity, and Find a Player to encourage almost 700,000 young people to try more sports more often and create a sporting revolution in Scotland through technology.

In celebration of the Year of Young People 2018’s ‘health and wellbeing’ theme, the partnership will enable users to find and join sports activities in their local area as well as finding people with similar interests to play with.

Find a Player is a Scottish start-up success story, winning four major industry awards and most recently being named ‘Best App’ at the Yahoo SportsTech Start-up Awards. With more than 100,000 sports events created on their platform by users they’re already the UK’s largest sport participation network.

Netball is among one of the first sports signed up to the new partnership, alongside golf, badminton, bowls, cricket, lacrosse, basketball, hockey and volleyball, which collectively boast more than half a million active registered players in Scotland. Several other sports are interested and expected to join the movement in the months ahead.

Jim Law, Find a Player Founder and CEO: “This is a fantastic 10-way partnership and a powerful reinforcement that technology can play a positive role in helping young people enjoy sports and lead an active lifestyle.

“Find a Player is thrilled to partner with Young Scot and the eight national governing bodies, including Netball Scotland, each of whom should be commended for being so forward-thinking and open to innovation in order to help us all collectively grow participation. We’re hugely excited by the opportunity to work with such great partners but, much more importantly, we hope this can have a really positive impact on the nation’s wider health and wellbeing.

“Quite simply we need to change the way that sport is delivered, put technology at the heart of the futures of Scotland’s sporting governing bodies and generate some real positive momentum together. Everybody wins from this partnership, especially the young people themselves, so my message to them is to get stuck in and try a new sport, have some fun and enjoy all the health and social benefits that come with it.”

Young Scot will promote the partnership through all social media channels to make sure as many young people as possible get involved in Find a Player.

Louise Macdonald, Chief Executive of Young Scot said: “Technology plays such a vital role in young people’s lives and its brilliant to see it impacting positively on their social lives and physical health. It will help them to connect with other young people in their community as well as get involved in new and exciting sports activities which fits perfectly with the theme of Health and Wellbeing in the Year of Young People 2018.”